When Fragonard came back to Paris on the edge of his thirtieth year it was to find that a great change had come over his master Boucher. The old, light-hearted, genial painter was showing signs of the burning of the candle of life at both ends. His art also was being bitterly assailed by the new critics—the new philosophy was asking for ennobling sentiments from the painted canvas, and the teaching of a moral lesson from all the arts. Boucher stood frankly bewildered, blinking questioning eyes at the frantic din. Old age had come upon him, creeping over the shrewd kindly features, dulling the exquisite sight. He could not wholly ignore the change that was taking place in public taste. The ideas of the philosophers were penetrating public opinion. The man of feeling had arisen and walked in the land. They were beginning to speak of the great antique days of Greece and Rome. Fickle fashion was about to turn her back upon Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and leafy groves, and to take up her abode awhile with heroes and amongst picturesque ruins.

Arrived in Paris, Fragonard at once set himself to the task of painting the historic or mythologic Academy-piece expected from the holder of the Prix de Rome on return from the Italian tour. He painted “The High Priest Coresus slaying himself to save CallirhoË,” which, though badly hung at the Salon, and still to be seen at the Louvre, was hailed with high praise by the academicians and critics. The only adverse criticisms of coldness and timidity levelled against it sound strange in the light of his after-career, which, whatever its weaknesses, was not exactly marked with coldness nor eke with timidity.

For two years thereafter he essayed the academic style.

But the praises of Diderot and Grimm failed to fill his pockets; and he decided to paint no more academic pieces for the critics’ praise. He had indeed no taste for such things, no sympathy with ancient thought nor with the dead past. He was, like his master, a very son of France—a child of his own age, glorying in the love of life and the beauty of his native land.

Having done his duty by his school, he turned his back upon it gleefully, as Boucher had also done before him, and set himself joyously to the painting of the life about him.

His great chance soon came, and in strange guise.

It so happened that a young blood at the court, one Baron de Saint-Julien, went to the painter Doyen with his flame, and asked him to paint a picture of the pretty creature being swung by a bishop whilst he himself watched the display of pretty ankles as the girl went flying through the air. Doyen had scruples; but recommended Fragonard for the naughty business.

Fragonard seized the idea readily enough, except that he made the frail girl’s husband swing the beauty for her lover’s eyes, using the incident, as usual, but as the trivial theme for a splendid setting amidst trees, glorying in the painting of the foliage—as you may see, if you step into the Wallace galleries, where is the exquisite thing that brought Fragonard fame—the world-famous “Les hazards heureux de l’Escarpolette.”

The effect was prodigious. De Launay’s brilliant engraving of it popularised it throughout the land. Nobles and rich financiers, and all the gay world of fashion besides, now strove to possess canvases signed by Fragonard. Boucher was grown old and ailing; and just as Boucher had been the painter of the France of fashion under the Pompadour, so Fragonard was now to become the mirror of the court, of the theatre, of the drawing-room, of the boudoir, of the age of Du Barry.

Finding a ready market for subjects of gallantry, he gave rein to his natural bent, and straightway leaped into the vogue. Pictures were the hobby of the nobility and the rich; and France under the Pompadour, and particularly at this the end of her reign, was madly spendthrift upon its hobbies and fickle fancies. The pretty house, delicately tinted rooms, fine furniture, dainty decorations, and charming pictures, were a necessity for such as would be in the fashion.

You shall look in vain for the affected innocence, the naÏve mawkishness, the chaste sentimentality of Greuze in the master-work of Fragonard. He knew nothing of these things—cared less. His was an ardent brush; and he used it ardently; but always you shall find him using his subject, however naughty, as the mere excuse for a glorious picture of trees. He is one of the great landscape-painters of France.

He had many qualities that go to make a decorative painter. Indeed, it is to the Frenchmen of the seventeen-hundreds to whom we may safely go for pictures that make the walls of a drawing-room a delight. Unlike the Italians, they are pleasing to live with. His painting of “La FÊte de St. Cloud,” in the dining-room of the Governor of the Bank of France, is one of the decorative landscapes of the world.

He was now producing works in considerable numbers—it is his first, his detailed period, somewhat severe in arrangement and style as to composition and handling—the years of “Love the Conqueror,” the “Bolt,” the “Fountain of Love,” of “Le Serment d’Amour,” the “Gimblette,” “Les Baigneuses,” the “Sleeping Bacchante,” the “DÉbut du modÈle,” and the like.

His master, Boucher, was grown old; he could not carry out the commissions for the decoration of rooms and for paintings with which he was overwhelmed; and it was in order to help forward his brilliant pupil, his “Frago,” that he now introduced him to his old friend and patron the farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour—a man of great wealth, a lover of art, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy—who became one of Fragonard’s most lavish patrons and most intimate friends. Bergeret de Grandcour commissioned several panels in this, Fragonard’s thirty-fifth year—the year of his painting the superb “FÊte de St. Cloud.” This is towards the end of that period of minute and detailed painting which he did with such consummate skill, yet without bringing pettiness into his largeness of conception.

Meantime, Choiseul’s masterly mind, having secured peace abroad, saw that France, if she were to keep her sovereign State, must be first cleansed from the dangers that threatened from within. He turned to the blotting out of the turbulent order of the Jesuits, whose vindictive acts against, and quarrels with, the Parliaments, and whose galling and oppressive tyranny, had roused the bitter hatred of the magistracy and of the people throughout the land. Choiseul they treated as their bitterest enemy. He decided to blot them out, root and branch, from France. The popular party closed up its ranks. Choiseul had not long to wait. The chance came in odd fashion enough. An attempt by the Order to end the Pompadour’s scandalous relations with the king was the quaint thing—the match that started the explosion. With all his skill of state-craft, Choiseul leaped to the weapon. In secret concert with the king’s powerful favourite he struck at them through the bankruptcy of their banking concerns in the West Indies, caused by their losses in the wars with England; and Louis abolished the society out of the land, secularising its members, and seizing its property.

The Pompadour lived but a short while to enjoy her triumph. Worn-out by her vast activities, and assailed by debt, she fell ill of a cough that racked her shrunken body. She died, transacting the king’s business and affairs of State, on the 15th of April 1764, in her forty-second year.

Whatever may be said of this cold-blooded, calculating, grasping woman, who crushed down every nice instinct of womanhood to win a king’s favour, who knew no scruple, who was without mercy, without pardon or forgiveness, without remorse; bitter and adamant in revenge; who turned a deaf ear to the cries from the Bastille; whose heart knew no love but for self; it must be allowed that at least for Art she did great and splendid service. She not only encouraged and brought out the best achievement of her age; she did Art an even more handsome benefit. She insisted on artists painting their age and not aping the dead past.

To Fragonard personally she rendered no particular service. His real achievement began on the eve of her death, when she was a worn-out and broken woman. Nor had Fragonard ever that close touch with the royal house or its favourites during any part of his lifetime that meant so much to the fortunes of his master, Boucher.

There were two patrons for whom Fragonard was about to create a series of masterpieces in the decoration of their splendid and luxurious homes—works of Art which were to have strange adventures and histories. They were both women.

For the prodigal and eccentric dancer, the notorious Mademoiselle Guimard, he undertook the painting of a series of panels. The Guimard was the rage of Paris—she of the orgic suppers and the naughty dances with her comrade Vestris. Frago, who is said to have been more than a friend of the reckless one of the nimble feet, undertook the decoration of her house in the ChaussÉe d’Antin, known to the bloods as the Temple of Terpsichore. He painted for the same room a portrait of the frail beauty as an opera-shepherdess—the simple pastoral life was the pose of this unsimple age. He was engaged upon the business, off and on, for several years; and the many delays at last fretted the light one. Fragonard, anything but energetic, liked always to take his own time at his work. The Guimard got to pestering him—she had a sharp tongue—and at last, one fine day, upbraided him roundly, taunting him with a sneer that he would never get the work finished. Fragonard lost patience and temper, goaded by her ill-manners, her abuse, and her biting tongue. “It is finished,” said he; and walked out of the house. The Guimard could never get him back; but one day he slipped in alone, painted the set dancer’s-smile from the dancer’s mouth, and placed there instead a snarl upon her lips.

Before this breach between them Fragonard had painted several portraits of the Guimard.

However, the work for the lady was to have far-reaching results little dreamed of. For the completion of the room, Fragonard procured the commission for David, then twenty-five; and David never forgot the service rendered. He was to repay it tenfold when black days threatened; and with rare courage, when even the courage of gratitude was a deadly dangerous commodity.

However, this was not as yet; the sun shone in the skies; and all was gaiety and laughter still.

The “Chiffre d’Amour,” the picture of a pretty girl who cuts her lover’s monogram in the bark of a tree’s trunk, the shadowed tree and figure telling darkly against the glamorous half light beyond, was one of Fragonard’s happiest inspirations of these years, as any one may see who steps into the Wallace galleries. Here also may be seen to-day the exquisite “Fair-haired Boy.” The boldly painted “L’Heure de Berger” was wet upon the canvas about this year, though its boldness of handling foretells his later manner, whilst the spirit of Boucher is over all.

Four years after the death of the Pompadour the patient neglected queen, amiable dull Marie Leczinska, followed her supplanter to the grave. The king’s grief and contrition and his solemn vows to mend his ways came somewhat over-late; they lasted little longer than the drying of his floods of tears over the body of his dead consort.

On the Eve of Candlemas, the first day of February 1769, at a convivial party in Paris that was not wholly without political significance, a Jesuit priest raised his glass To the Presentation! adding after the toast—“To that which has taken place to-day, or will take place to-morrow, the presentation of the new Esther, who is to replace Haman and release the Jewish nation from oppression!”

He spoke figuratively—it was safer so. But ’twas understood. Indeed, the pretty sentiment was well received by the old aristocrats and young bloods about the table; and they drank a bumper to the pretty Madame du Barry. For the Jesuits had no love for the king’s minister Choiseul—and the madcap girl was but the lure whereby the king was to be drawn from his great minister. So religion rallied about the frail beauty, and hid behind her extravagant skirts—one of which cost close on £2000—and, with the old nobility, drank damnation to the king’s minister and To the devil with the new thought and with parliaments. Long live the king and the divine right of kings!

Our worthy priest seems to have had the ear of destiny, though he dated his certainty near upon a couple of months too soon.

So it came about that before a year was out the old king was become the doting creature of a light-o’-love of Paris, the transfigured milliner and street-pedlar, Jeanne, natural child of one Anne BÉqus, a low woman of Vaucouleurs. This Jeanne, of no surname and unknown father, a pretty, kindly, vulgar child of the gutters, with fair hair and of madcap habits, was some twenty-six years of age, when—being reborn under a forged birth-certificate at the king’s ordering, as Anne de Vaubernier, and being married by the same orders to the Count du Barry, an obliging nobleman of the court—she appeared at Versailles as the immortally frail Countess du Barry.

The remonstrances of Choiseul with the king against this new degradation of the throne of France, and his unconcealed scorn and disgust of the upstart countess, made a dangerous enemy for France’s great minister, and was to cost him and his France very dear.

The king’s infatuation brought royalty into utter contempt amongst the people. It was to cost France a terrible price—and Fragonard not least of all.

One of the first gifts from the king to the Du Barry was the little castle of Louveciennes; and she proceeded with reckless extravagance to furnish her handsome home. Drouais, the artist, sold to her for 1200 livres (double florins), as overdoors for one of the rooms, four panels that he had bought from Fragonard. They have vanished; but they served Fragonard a good turn—he received an order to decorate Du Barry’s luxurious pavilion of Luciennes, which she had had built to entertain the king at her “little suppers.”

Thus it chanced that for this wilful light-o’-love Fragonard painted the great master-work of his life—the five world-famous canvases of the series of “The Progress of Love in the Heart of Maidenhood,” or, as they are better known, “The Romance of Love and Youth”—the old king masquerading therein as a young shepherd, and the Du Barry as a shepherdess. In “The Ladder” (“L’Escalade” or “Le Rendezvous”) the Du Barry plays the part of a timid young girl who starts as she sees her shepherd-lover to be the king; the “Pursuit” follows; then the “Souvenirs” and “Love Crowned.” The last of the five, the discarded mistress in “Deserted,” was only begun; and was not completed by Fragonard until twenty years later at Grasse, to complete the set.

What it was that struck a chill into the frail Du Barry’s favour, so that the masterpieces of Fragonard never entered within her doors, is not fully known. Whatsoever the cause, these canvases were rejected by her. It is said that the work was found to be disappointing, being lacking as to the indecencies by the Du Barry and the king, who preferred the more suggestive panels of Vien. It is true that Fragonard’s earlier four panels which she possessed were in questionable taste, and that these five were pure; indeed, their trivial story matters little amidst the massy foliage and the majestic trees that spring into the swinging heavens. Fragonard suspected, and somewhat resented the suspicion, that he was being made to paint in a sort of artistic duel with Vien. At any rate, Vien was chosen. So it came that the discarded pictures lay in Fragonard’s studio for over twenty years, when we shall see them, rolled up, making a chief part of the strange baggage of Fragonard’s flight from his beloved Paris.

The fact was that the Du Barry was of the gutter. She had the crude love of fineries of the girl promoted from the gutter. She loved display. But into her home she brought the vulgar singers of the lowest theatres, where the Pompadour had brought the wits and leading artists of her time. The old culture was gone. Louis laughed now at ribald songs, and was entertained by clowns.

It is part of the irony of life that Fragonard, who never entered into the favourite’s friendship, should have become the recognised artist of her day. It was a part of that grim irony that caused the Du Barry, whose age he honours, to reject the most exquisite work of his hands—in which his art is seen at its highest achievement, the tender half-melancholy of the thing stated with a lyric beauty that displays his genius in its supreme flight.

A search through the Du Barry’s bills—and there are four huge bound volumes of them—reveals the list of pictures painted by Boucher, by Vien, by Greuze, and by others, for the spendthrift woman; but of transaction with Fragonard there is no slightest hint.